GTK Krell Monitors | Hacker News Reader

GTK Krell Monitors

gkrellm.srcbox.net

92 pointsDeeg9rie9usi37 comments

The original author of gkrellm, Bill Wilson, also made PiKrellCam. <https://billw2.github.io/pikrellcam/pikrellcam.html>

Which was/is the best Raspberry Pi Audio/Video Recording, OSD Motion Detect Program. It was made to run perfectly on a RPI Zero with its limited CPU and memory.

I was very sad to learn that Bill passed away in Oct 2021. <https://github.com/billw2/pikrellcam/issues/78#issuecomment-...>

I'm glad gkrellm got a new maintainer and continues to exist.

The eulogy from his brother is worth a read https://github.com/billw2/pikrellcam/issues/78#issuecomment-...

What a blast from the past! Stoked it’s still under development!

Had a look for the etymology of “Krell” - in the readme it mentions “GKrellM - keeping an eye on your computer’s Id”.

Seems to be a reference to this 1956 movie, Forbidden Planet / Monsters from the Id: http://guidetomonsters.com/html/50s/Id%20Monster.html

Can I get a fact check?

The Wiki says you're spot on. Impressive sleuthing.

https://archive.ph/20120710180815/http://members.dslextreme....

past? I'm still running it. If I don't, I find something is missing on the right side of my screen. I got my theme off freshmeat.net. The original source is gone now [1], so I have to copy the theme to any new laptop I have.

[1] can't find a mirror anywhere. But if anyone knows the "Industrial" theme, I'd love to know.

If you're looking for an OSS project to contribute, GKrellM needs your help! It is still using GTK2 which is deprecated and will go away sooner or later.

Patches are welcome! https://git.srcbox.net/gkrellm/gkrellm/issues/1

Aahh this brings back memories. I first started out using Linux on my desktop and I found this fancy system monitor that made my desktop look cool. There's a section which displays filesystem usage with a button that allows mounting/unmounting with a click. I used it to mount floppy disks but it wasn't working for me, so I read the source to figure out what was wrong, then emailed Bill to contribute a patch to fix it.

It was one of my first open source contributions, and it was then that I understood the value of open source - being able to read the code, debug and then fix it yourself (and for others).

I used this back in the days and it was awesome. Sadly after the dawn of tiling window managers this is obsolete since you will never really see it as windows always takes full screen. If anyone knows how to make it play well with i3wm or awesome wm, let me know, would gladly use this again.

Does not help you but the question nerd sniped me to try it as an exercise in my preferred tiling WM spectrwm.

https://github.com/conformal/spectrwm

This lets it act as a sort of toolbar, present on all workspaces.

in .spectrwmrc add

    #shrink the region by 112 to allow space for the widget
    region = screen[1]:2448x1440+0+0
    #add quirk to remove from normal workspaces
    quirk[Gkrellm] = WS[-1]

then start on right side of screen

    gkrellm -geometry -0+0

I normally would probably just put that in my .xsession but there is an option to auto start it with spectrwm, untested

    autorun = ws[-1]:gkrellm -geometry -0+0

Would be cool to see a screenshot

IIRC AwesomeWM has the option to define the area of the screen used for tiling. It's called workarea[0] I think. So in theory you should be able to just make the screen a bit smaller and free some screen estate for other things.

[0] https://awesomewm.org/doc/api/classes/screen.html#screen.wor...

I ran this thing with slackware and window manager back in the day. My goodness, I have forgotten about this entirely.

I might have to spin it up for fun.

For all the nix fols, "nix run nixpkgs#gkrellm" works =P

These days it is one of the most underrated tool! I never has a problem with it under any DE or WM.

FWIW, it is still bundled with Slackware.

To be fair, everything is still bundled with Slackware.

I used to run this, but once systems started having 20 cpu cores, and 12 hard drives, it wouldn't fit on the screen anymore... sadly conky has the same issue.

I think perhaps I’m old school, but I’ve been using xosview with a patch that shows ccx utilization (on AMD) instead of per core. Treats me pretty well, but it’s a very unloved project.

Do you have a link to that patched version?

Just scale down the chart size. For my 16 core system each CPU chart is just 5px high, it works great because you still have the horizontal indicators.

If I have more than 8 threads, I'll use the composite CPU chart instead. Also, I have to tell it to ignore veth, vnet, and virbr network interfaces, since I run virt-manager on the box as well.

You can pick and choose which devices are important to monitor, and you can combine all the CPU cores into one chart. That's what I do anyway.

Wow, it’s funny because the last time I ran gkrellm was 23 years ago when I first started using Linux and I thought I was a l33t h4x0r…

And just today, now that I actually write code for a living and use Linux on my work machine, I found myself really wanting a good display to tell me when my memory usage was growing.[0] I was using the gnome activity monitor but it takes up way too much screen space and was always behind the window I was using. It looks like this could actually be useful for me to run now!

[0] I was running a local kubernetes cluster with an opentracing implementation, where I hadn’t quite worked out the configs for memory usage yet, and it kept spiking and OOMing when I wasn’t looking. It’s fun when your mouse cursor just stops moving and you’re wondering whether you need to hold down the power button or what…

You might also consider Conky: https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3010/system-monitor-n... is good.

It has a client/server mode. I used to run the server on my wrt54g and the GUI client on my desktop.

I loved this tool. Always ran it with fluxbox as the WM.

I have been using gkrellm for at least the last 25 years or so. I very much like being able to see what my system is doing at a glance and no other system monitor comes close to being both as detailed and compact.

Are you also still running fvwm or wmaker? It kind of integrates not so good in e.g. Gnome`s mutter, yeah?

Works fine under KDE/Plasma

I've used it on all of the DEs I've had over the years, gnome 1,2,3, MATE, cinnamon, KDE, etc.

There's nothing to integrate, it just runs and sits there doing its job.

Same here. One of my favorite plugins is BubbleFishyMon which seems funny (and it is: water, air bubbles, fishes and a duck indicating system/memory/network load), until one realizes how much information it can convey with just a brief glance.

At least once a year for the past couple of decades I'll receive an email from a user that makes me want to modernize bfm¹. However, I've never managed to get an auto-scaling version to work with reasonable performance, which is unbelievably annoying for such a simple tool. You can sort of hit the target for gkrellm-bfm while still depending on GTK2, or for the standalone bubblefishymon wmapplet where you can use a modern GTK² or jump straight to SDL.

Never in a way that doesn't noticeably chew additional CPU though, and definitely not for both use cases. It upsets me each time I reply "no, not happening without patches". Perhaps it is time to release an Electron version or one that just burns a whole CPU core so it isn't lost forever ;)

¹ It used to just be people with crazy setups, now it is basically any screen given their higher DPI.

² As it is right now I don't even have a system that I can use last release on.

I'm 19 years old, kde3 is just out and compiling it with objprelink makes it go brr, gkrellm on the side of my desktop, XMMS and a playlist of ripped CDs and assorted downloads, Quake II deathmatch is as fun as it ever was, I have no real worries and make just enough to never skimp for a beer or two. Life is good. Thanks for the memories ;)

I have been using this software continuously for close to 20 years. My desktop doesn't feel right without it. Thank you Bill Wilson!

gkrellm used to be a mainstay on my desktops in the early 2000s, such a nice throwback. For extra vintage goodness, I also recommend xosview [0], even better when using a Motif-styled window manager. I actually wonder what either of them would look like on a system with, say, an Epyc 9965 or similar (192 cores) or a system with four or more sockets.

ah, nostalgia for that feeling working on systems that looked like that.

[0] https://www.pogo.org.uk/~mark/xosview/

I have used gkrellm since 1998 when my preferred wm was blackbox and playing MP3s in xmms was cool. Still run it today on Cinnamon. RIP Bill and thanks for the OSS contribution of a lifetime!

Thanks for the memory lane drive. I used to run this on FreeBSD desktop under fluxbox wm wayyy back, I think in 2004. So cool.

I had no issues running these kind of monitors on crappy single-core Pentium 3 laptops, yet these days I avoid monitoring widgets because I feel they're too heavy and unnecessary bloat. To be fair, these days they're probably written in Electron or Python, compared to efficient C.

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